Michael Begler writes period drama with the footnotes showing. Twenty years of sitcoms and romantic comedies with Jack Amiel led to The Knick, which knows exactly how a wound was stitched in 1900 and is less sure what to do with the man stitching it.
Fi1m perspective
A Begler script begins with the equipment. In The Knick (2014) the surgeons of a downtown New York hospital in 1900 operate in a wooden bowl of a room while students look down from the benches, and the series knows what every instrument on the tray is for. He and Jack Amiel researched the medicine, the social history and the machinery of the period before they wrote it, and it shows in the best way: the doctors talk like people who do this every day, not like people explaining it to us. The idea, Begler has said, came from a stomach complaint of his own and the thought of what it would have been like to be treated for it a century earlier. That is a good place for a hospital drama to start, and the fear never quite leaves the building.
Nothing in the first two decades of his career predicted it. He began as a production assistant on The Cosby Show, wrote on sitcoms including Herman's Head and Malcolm in the Middle, then moved with Amiel into feature comedies: Raising Helen (2004), The Shaggy Dog, Big Miracle (2012). They wrote The Knick pilot on spec, and Steven Soderbergh directed, photographed and edited all twenty episodes himself. "It feels like this was maybe what we were meant to do all along," Begler said at the time, "but it just took 20 years to get there." We would not argue.
What the pair do well is plan a season as a whole and hand it to a director who can shoot it quickly, and the result was the best-looking thing we have seen made for television. We flinched at the surgery more than once, and the flinch was earned by the writing as much as by the camera: because the scripts know what the procedure is and what it did to the last patient, the danger on the table is never vague. Where the writing is weaker is at the centre. Clive Owen's Thackery, the genius addict, is the one stock figure in the building, and everyone around him is better drawn, which is an odd shape for a series to have and one the writers must take some of the blame for.
Perry Mason (2020), the noir origin story for Erle Stanley Gardner's lawyer, we found handsome, slow and about three episodes too long, with Matthew Rhys carrying it. Begler took over as showrunner for its second season, so the pace of the first is not his to answer for, and our review of the series cannot tell you whether he tightened it.
He has found his period, and the medicine and the courtrooms suit him. What he has not yet written, on our evidence, is a lead as carefully made as the world around him.
Biography
Michael Begler is an American television writer, producer and screenwriter. He was born and raised on Long Island, New York, and studied English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he met his longtime writing partner Jack Amiel.
Begler began his career writing for sitcoms including Herman's Head, Empty Nest, The Jeff Foxworthy Show, The Tony Danza Show and Malcolm in the Middle. In the mid-2000s he moved into feature films, co-writing the screenplays for The Prince & Me (2004), Raising Helen (2004), The Shaggy Dog (2006) and Big Miracle (2012).
With Amiel, Begler co-created the Cinemax series The Knick (2014–2015), serving as executive producer and writing the majority of episodes; Steven Soderbergh directed. They later became showrunners and executive producers on the second season of the HBO series Perry Mason (2020).
